Why Giovinazzi's lack of progress has taken him out of the F1 game

One person gets eliminated, and more cash is added to the pot for the next game.

This, of course, refers to Antonio Giovinazzi’s Formula 1 career running out of rail as Guanyu Zhou picks up the Alfa Romeo reins for 2022 alongside Valtteri Bottas. Zhou, currently second in this year’s Formula 2 title fight, will bring with him youthful exuberance and flair with him – along with a healthy supply backing from his native China.

Hence, the tortured opening to this column in a vain attempt to shoehorn in a Squid Game metaphor, mainly to underline how cruel the world of F1 is.

Yet, if Giovinazzi had been a character in the Korean drama sensation, he’d have been a middling one at best. Far too good to lose in the early rounds, he’d have managed to make it to the midway stage when the games really start whittling people down. But, for the past three years, he’s failed to win [spoiler alert] a game of marbles against an old man; an old man who’s simply in it for the fun.

With Zhou incoming, Giovinazzi’s time with Alfa Romeo is up – cue uproar from the usual social media crowd, which seems to think that F1 has never sanctioned drivers bringing their own sponsorship with them and that the Italian driver’s departure is the world’s greatest injustice. Of course, Giovinazzi’s own position in the team was supported by Ferrari, but perhaps that doesn’t entirely suit the narrative.

Facetiousness aside, there’s a good point made by some of the comments - and a point alluded to by Giovinazzi himself post-release – F1 drivers should be picked on performances, not money. And in an ideal world, this would be correct; many potential F1 champions have fallen by the wayside in their quest to reach the top table, simply because their wallets weren’t bulging enough.

Unfortunately, an ideal world free of every ill does not exist. But even in that impossible scenario, could Giovinazzi honestly lay claim to Alfa’s second seat for 2022? Let’s crunch some numbers.

Antonio Giovinazzi kicked off his F1 career as a substitute for the injured Pascal Wehrlein at Sauber

Photo by: Zak Mauger/Motorsport Images

The Pugliese driver has enjoyed three-and-a-bit seasons in F1, all with the same team; let’s not forget his two-race cameo for Sauber in 2017 when Pascal Wehrlein’s injury from that winter’s Race of Champions left him unfit for the opening pair of rounds. Giovinazzi was genuinely impressive in the Melbourne opener, qualifying under 0.2s away from team-mate Marcus Ericsson and finished 12th, albeit two laps down in an attrition-hit season opener.

The qualifying deficit was largely the same for China, with both Sauber drivers making it into Q2 against the run of play – but with a key caveat: Giovinazzi got on the astroturf at the final corner and spun into the wall on the opposite side of the circuit, ending the opening session. After a quietly impressive start to life in F1, Giovinazzi’s second album was a much more difficult sell. After three laps of the race, following a virtual safety car period, he produced a near-carbon copy of his qualifying shunt to cap off a miserable weekend.

Giovinazzi’s F1 career began properly two years later, with Sauber having since become Alfa Romeo. The incoming Kimi Raikkonen would prove to be his benchmark over the next three years, having come off the back of his best season with Ferrari amid his second stint with the team.

However, Raikkonen was fast approaching his 40s at the time of his signing, an age in which athletes are generally considered to decline in their physical capabilities. Thus, if Giovinazzi was to put himself in the frame for a future Ferrari drive, he needed to use 2019 as a learning season and then put the veteran Finn to the sword in their future seasons.

Had Giovinazzi been convincing enough for Alfa to keep him in the drive, then Zhou would have loomed a little less large in the mirrors, but from a performance standpoint it simply hasn’t been the case

The two were very evenly matched in qualifying across the 2019 season. Taking equivalent sessions into account, measuring the two in the final session that they happened to be together before one was eliminated in the event that both did not make it to Q3, Raikkonen edged the qualifying average by a mere 0.005s. For the interests of balance, any anomalous results have been discarded.

Extrapolating Raikkonen’s qualifying advantage into a points share, Giovinazzi should theoretically have matched his team-mate in the final standings; but as it was, Raikkonen outscored his younger team-mate by 43 points to 14. A 29-point swing in the standings does not reflect their closeness in qualifying, but Giovinazzi was considerably worse at converting good qualifying results into points-scoring performances.

Regardless, one can concede wiggle room to a rookie driver; first seasons are usually meant to be a chance for a driver to get the errors out of their system and use it as a chance to grow within the pressure cooker environment of Formula 1.

Carlos Sainz Jr., Ferrari SF21, battles with Antonio Giovinazzi, Alfa Romeo Racing C41, ahead of Yuki Tsunoda, AlphaTauri AT02

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Compare that predicament to Carlos Sainz Jr and Lando Norris at McLaren; Norris also enjoyed his first full season in F1 in 2019, and was comprehensively outscored by Sainz in their first year together at McLaren by 96 to 49 points. But Norris cut the arrears to just 8 points between them in his second year, encapsulating his growth as a driver over the span of a year.

Arguably, Giovinazzi did that in 2020. He sustained a qualifying advantage over Raikkonen that was 0.020s on average; the two remained evenly matched, even if the 2020 Alfa Romeo C39 was considerably poorer than its predecessor – perhaps hamstrung by the lobotomy that the Ferrari power unit had received over the off-season.

Raikkonen and Giovinazzi ended 2020 level on points, scoring four a piece, although Raikkonen finished nine of the 13 races that the two finished ahead of Giovinazzi; his team-mate returned the favour only four times. Regardless, 2021 had to be the year that Giovinazzi really stepped up his game and put himself in the shop window for either a 2022 continuation or frame himself as an option for another team.

But so far, with three races remaining, that has yet to happen. The qualifying advantage that the Italian has enjoyed over Raikkonen has dropped to 0.014s - tiny margins, but a margin that shows minimal progress across the past three seasons. The points difference between the two is even more stark; Giovinazzi has a sole point to his name this season, while Raikkonen has 10 having competed in two fewer races owing to his COVID-enforced lay-off for Zandvoort and Monza.

In those two races, Giovinazzi enjoyed two of his best qualifying sessions this season, grabbing seventh on the grid at the Dutch circuit and collected eighth in the Monza sprint - which became seventh once more as Bottas was levied a grid penalty through adding power unit components to his pool. But Giovinazzi could not capitalise in either case, spearing into Sainz in the latter case after going off at the Variante della Roggia and failing to rejoin safely. Again, using the same points-per-qualifying average rubric used for 2019, Giovinazzi should be at least equal on points with his team-mate – and yet, Raikkonen still has a nine-point advantage in a season where points have been scarce for Alfa Romeo.

For Alfa, the team had seen enough. Giovinazzi’s F1 career has stalled out and, as part of the team’s continuation with Alfa Romeo branding, Ferrari had relinquished its ownership over the second seat – one which Charles Leclerc had previously converted into a full-fat Ferrari seat. Had Giovinazzi been convincing enough for Alfa to keep him in the drive, then Zhou would have loomed a little less large in the mirrors, but from a performance standpoint it simply hasn’t been the case. And thus, in the ideal world that drivers desire to be judged upon, he probably wouldn’t earn a reprieve there either.

It’s not all been in vain; Giovinazzi has enjoyed a handful of good performances in F1. His fifth-place in Brazil back in 2019 – his high-water mark – showed the opportunism that drivers need to have when staring in the face of chaos. He also did well to pick up ninth at the start of last year’s truncated season in a year in which points would be hard to come by – but on a ‘normal’ weekend, Giovinazzi hasn’t been able to take advantage of situations where the car has been handy quite like Raikkonen has. Battle-hardened experience does play in those scenarios but, given Giovinazzi is now three seasons into an F1 career, he simply hasn’t made the most of them.

Antonio Giovinazzi, Alfa Romeo Racing C41

Photo by: Jerry Andre / Motorsport Images

That’s a shame, given Giovinazzi’s explosive GP2 season in 2016 in which he battled with Pierre Gasly for the title. There, he rattled off back-to-back victories during the Baku weekend, especially since his sprint victory was pulled out of the bag from the back of the grid. Unfortunately, in a world where F1 teams are perennially searching for the next mega-talent, Giovinazzi hasn’t kicked on from that season – which earned him a contract with Ferrari’s driver academy.

Once again, Italy is left without a driver on the grid – a problem that Giovinazzi himself had solved after Jarno Trulli and Vitantonio Liuzzi bowed out at the end of 2011 – and it may be a while before another comes along.

Regardless, Giovinazzi has options for the future, and will make the switch to Formula E in 2022 after Dragon / Penske Autosport has signed him up to partner Sergio Sette Camara at the team. But it may serve him well to keep ties with Ferrari, who can surely throw some more work his way in the future.

Ferrari might like to keep him in the fold for its other projects too, namely its impending WEC Hypercar project which will debut in 2023

His turn as Ferrari’s simulator driver back in 2018 helped the team out of many a jam, in which poor Friday practice sessions were transformed into headline results thanks to Giovinazzi’s work back at Maranello. He’d be a handy reserve driver to keep around, in a similar vein to compatriots Gianni Morbidelli and Nicola Larini back in the 1990s.

Ferrari might like to keep him in the fold for its other projects too, namely its impending WEC Hypercar project which will debut in 2023. He’d be a real asset to that project, especially with those development credentials, and has endurance racing experience having driven LMP2 machinery in 2016 across the WEC, and both European and Asian Le Mans Series too. 

But in F1, at least for the time being, Player 99 has been eliminated.

Antonio Giovinazzi, Alfa Romeo Racing C41

Photo by: Jerry Andre / Motorsport Images